


Imprisonment

by JMount74



Series: Febuwhump [3]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Gen, Imprisonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29175081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JMount74/pseuds/JMount74
Summary: Imprisonment can take many forms.
Series: Febuwhump [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137590
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	Imprisonment

It feels cold and harsh and black and _evil_.

Something he would not have wished on his worst enemy. Yet here he was and, despite everything he could do, how resourceful he was, he was trapped.

Imprisoned by the one man he had always strived to avoid like a colleague of his had managed. He didn’t know how Brains had escaped from the hellhole he found himself in, and a part of himself cursed that man’s lucky escape. 

Maybe, just as for the Hood, maybe the Tracy’s _were_ the key. They – their father – had snatched Brains out from under the nose of the Hood before he even realised what he had lost.

It was a shame they had not done the same for him.

No matter. For whatever reason, he had been forgotten, forsaken, _ignored_ , in favour of the brighter spark. It did not rankle. Really, it didn’t.

And he had continued to create wonderful engines and machines until the day the Hood noticed him. And his prize creation. If he had hoped for a miracle to whisk him away after every defence he had failed, he would not get one. For his one possible chance at a miracle – one Jeff Tracy – had been blown up with the pinnacle of his career.

The pain at first was horrific. He wasn’t sure how it happened. One minute he was at home, the next minute he woke up somewhere else. A dark room. The smell of blood, of antiseptic, of something medical. And that voice. Dripping like the oil he used to keep the cogs turning. Laying out his options – he didn’t have any – and explaining what had been done to him. That there was no escape until _he_ decreed it.

Evil whispered in his ears at night. An imprisonment, a bondage so unique he wasn’t sure anyone else would ever believe him. And he was as helpless as a day-old kitten in front of a tiger.

He was made to do horrible things. To take his beautiful creations and twist them to suit an evil mind. To steal. To attack. To destroy.

There was a part that was a little bit glad that he could now say he was as good an engineer as Brains was. His mecha’s were a stroke of genius. He had the ability to harness null-point energy. And when he went head-to-head for the first time with a Thunderbird his mecha’s proved their worth. 

He wanted to rejoice. To rub their noses in the fact that he had beaten them. Hell, he’d almost killed two of them that day, and he’d bragged about knowing Brains to the girl. But deep down he hated what he had become, what he was driven to do. It was only the promise of freedom from the prison the Hood had put him into that allowed his conscience to cope with everything he was doing.

He hated himself. There were times when he would gladly have ended it all, but the prison bonds the Hood had installed prevented this, and he could never find a work-around despite his vast computing knowledge.

Then he thought he was saved. For the Hood had decided it was time to leave the literal prison he was in and he was the key to getting him out.

He was late. And he knew the Hood did not tolerate anything he deemed as failure. He prayed that he would still set him free as promised, but that was becoming increasingly unlikely. The man was inherently not to be trusted, not that he had any other choice, and had decided to offer him up as a sacrificial lamb.

He may have been imprisoned by the Hood, but there were still things he could do. He fled. Somehow, somehow he had managed to break some of the hold the Hood had on him. Now it was all he could think about, destroy the Hood and destroy the hold that criminal had over him.

It became his burning passion. His mission in life. And the Hood unwittingly gave him the best way to carry out that mission. Build project Sentinel. He’d nearly killed the eldest Tracy again in his mission while trying to get power for his project, almost killed the Hood too, but at the last minute those interfering Tracy’s got in his way again.

He was beginning to hate that Scott Tracy almost as much as the Hood did.

His hatred bubbled over when that family again deprived him of his prey. Not only that, they led the GDF directly to him. Despite Brains’ promise to set him free – which he did not believe, there was no way that family would help him after he killed their father and tried repeatedly to kill them – he knew now what needed to be done.

He was placed in a literal prison. A prison that would limit, but never remove, the Hood’s influence over him. He found peace at last. A quiet life without technology that allowed his battered mind time to heal itself metaphorically, even if he couldn’t literally.

Then that girl appeared, offering to uphold Brains’ deal if he would rebuild his biggest failure, the one that led him here in the first place. There was no way he was going back, so when the opportunity was there, and the choice again was life imprisoned serving that man or death in the great void of space there was no doubt at all in his mind.

She changed it though. Just three words. ‘Jeff Tracy’s alive.’ He had not failed after all. If anything, his engine was brilliant and perfect. So the part that wanted to curl up and die did just that while the rest of him sought refuge in the unlikeliest of places.

He did not like being trapped on the island. He did not like being trapped on an island with three men he had tried to kill, all of them multiple times. It was a type of imprisonment he had not been prepared for.

Brains had been true to his word though. Eventually, and with much drama, he had managed to free him permanently from the Hood’s hold. And with the Zero-XL now a reality and a rescue well on the cards, he finally began to feel free.

Freedom from imprisonment can take many forms. He was free from the mental control the Hood had over him. He was free from the psychological bars that the loss of the Zero-X and Jeff Tracy placed on him. He was free from the real bars of the Hex prison. True, he was technically still imprisoned, completing a special rehabilitation course curtesy of the GDF after International Rescue put in a good word for him.

But he felt free for the first time in years.


End file.
